Populating the British Colonies in America

The majority of the first European settlers in the US were indentured servants, a form of labor debt that one willingly sells oneself into. Additionally, the initial settlements were funded by capital and new forms of business organization such as the joint-stock company. Most people are pretty well-informed about Indentured servitude and the trading companies, so this entry focuses mainly on the conditions responsible for the populating of the Americas with people from the Old World.

When Columbus first landed in the Caribbean, he believed he had landed in an Edenic paradise. Here is how he described Cuba, which he called Juana

The Edenic imagery would even be extended to the people of Cuba
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These Edenic images would be promulgated throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In New England, the incredible abundance of plant and animal life left visitors dumbfounded. In their letters they protested to correspondents on the other side of the Atlantic that, however hard to believe, the reports of what they discovered was not exaggerated. "The abundance of Sea-Fish," wrote the Reverend Francis Higginson in 1630, "are almost beyond beleeving, and sure I should scarce have beleeved it except I had seene it with mine own eyes." Fish were so numerous in streams that one inhabitant fancied that he could walk on the backs of the fish without getting his feet wet. Alewives were so plentiful that they scarcely had room to swim. Birds were just as copious. John Josselyn measured their numbers in the "millions of millions" and others described the flocks as so populous that they blocked out the sun. Within the space of a mile one could find 100 deer, which themselves were larger than the fallow deer of England. Wood, which was particularly scarce in England, seemed in infinite supply in New England. Francis Higginson noted that wood was so copious that a common person in New England could be warmer in the winter than the nobility of England
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The discovery of the New World occurred during a time when Renaissance Landscape painting and Arcadian ideal was already popular. Arcadia, which in English poetry was referred to as Arcady, was a utopia named after an Ancient Greek city where the inhabitants had continued to live in pastoral simplicity, unafflicted by the pride and avarice of other regions. The people of Arcady lived closed to nature in complete innocence and virtue, much like Adam and Eve. To the people of Europe, the New World must have seemed to be this mythical Arcadia, populated with Noble Savages and flowing with Edenic abundance. In 1605 Michael Drayton, in a collection of poems called Lyrick and Pastoral, wrote "To the Virginian Voyage" in which he praises Virginia as "Earth's only paradise" where
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A comedy by George Chapman, Ben Johnson, and John Marston called "Eastward Hoe!" also expresses the typical advertisements related to Virginia

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These descriptions of a land of vast abundance flowing with milk and honey would have been quite a shock to the people of Europe during a time when living standards were falling and constraints on resources such as wood and farmland were becoming acute. Throughout the early modern period epidemic outbreaks of plague and small pox, along with routine diseases such as measles, influenza, diptheria, typhus, and typhoid fever swept across European cities every 25-30 years, killing 10-20% of the population. As late in the mid-17th century a plague struck London that killed 1 in 6 people in a matter of months. Any slight fluctuations in food prices could cause sudden deaths of tens of thousands of people living on the margins of subsistence. Roadside ditches filled with stagnant water served as latrines all throughout Europe. The bodies of dead people were stacked in rows in large, deep, open pits called poor holes. In rural areas, between half and 90 percent of the population did not have land sufficient for their support, forcing many to migrate out, fall into permanent debt, or die. Half of all children in Europe died before age 10.(1) Thousands of Europeans were severely in debt, and the debtors prisons of Europe were very crowded.(5) Deforestation had driven up the prices of fuel, inducing efforts at forest conservation,(6) as well as reducing the real purchasing power of workers. (7)

In England, Enclosures had resulted in thousands of peasants being kicked off their lands, creating a class of landless laborers. A few decades after Columbus had discovered the New World Sir Thomas More describes some of the effects of these enclosures in his work Utopia. He blames the epidemic of theft on the greed of the aristocrats

Furthermore, More explains how the transformation of farmland into pasture land (for the growing of sheep whose wool could be sold for profit) had been disastrous for the peasantry.
One particular passage is striking in how it resembles the social disintegration caused by debt peonage in Ancient Societies described by David Graeber in Debt: The First 5000 Years. More describes how, losing their land, families must sell all their possessions to survive, as their are insufficient jobs for all the excess labor. When the paltry sums they get for selling their possessions runs out, they eventually have to resort to stealing. In contrast, because land is controlled by so few, owners can hoard food and clothing to drive up the prices, akin to the grain hoarding that resulted in famines in India and Ireland in the eighteenth and nineteenth century.
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All this provides the context for why so many Europeans were willing to come to a strange land, braving a dangerous journey across a vast sea. For most of the people who came to the Americas, there was not much to lose. Life was nasty, brutish, and short at home, and the New World promised freedom, self-ownership, and prosperity.

Most of the first settlers in the United States were slaves and indentured servants. The average cost of a journey to the Americas in the seventeenth century was 9-10 pounds, which was more than a years wages for the average worker. So to finance the voyage thousands of farmers, unskilled workers, artisans, and domestic servants sold themselves into a temporary form of debt slavery called Indentured Servitude. Landowners, shopkeepers, manufacturers, and merchants would purchase Indentured contracts for 10-12 pounds, which was essentially a loan that enabled the bounded servant to come to the Americas. But instead of paying the loan back with money, they paid it back with labor. The contract entitled the owner to full control over the servant for 3-7 years (the typical contract was 4 years). During that time, the Servant could not marry or engage in any trade or contract without permission from his owner. Furthermore, the owner could severely punish the servant for any perceived infraction. Of the 500,000 people who made the trip to the New World by 1775, an estimated 350,000, or approximately 2/3's, where indentured servants. In Pennsylvania, it was not uncommon to find a master with 50 bound servants on his estate. From Massachussets to Georgia bound servants could be found in the fields, kitchens, and workshops.(9) For German immigrants it was a little different; like their counterparts in England, Scotland, and Ireland, The Germans immigrants, who were called redemptioners, financed their voyage to the Americas with credit, supplied by ship captains, which they repaid either with loans from friends and family or shortly after arriving in the Americas.(4)

Other changes in the nature of finance and credit had to take place before the Americas could be colonized. In the fifteenth century some English courts established one of the most important defining features of the corporation, the doctrine of limited liability; "if something is owed to the group, it is not owed to the individuals, nor do the individuals owe what the group owe." Without limited liability, when investors entered collective business ventures they would put all they owe at risk; with limited liability, investors would only be liable for the amount of their investment. (4)

Most of the first settlements in New England were financed by joint-stock companies, which was a company where investors pooled their money, each getting a piece of the company (and more importantly were not liable for any debts the company occurred). The first English joint-stock companies were the Muscovy Company in 1555, the Spanish Company n 1577, the East India Company in 1601, and the Virginia Company in 1606, which was actually two companies, the Virginia Company of London and the Virginia Company of Plymouth, chartered to establish colonies in the New World. The Virginia Company of London established the Jamestown settlement in 1607, and the Plymouth Company established a permanent settlement in Plymouth, Massachusetts in 1620. Ultimately, these settlements suffered heavy capital losses. Neither the principle nor the interest on the Virginia's Company's investment of more than 200,000 pounds (20 million dollars in today's values) was ever repaid.(5)

The failure of these colonies resulted largely from the Arcadian myths that these settlers brought to the New World. The descriptions of New World abundance were accurate, for a season. Most of the descriptions were written by spring and summer visitors. Again, mythology played a key role in the interpretation of the New World; because the early visitors believed they had discovered Arcadia, they assumed that the spring and summer abundance was perpetual rather than seasonal. What they also failed to realize is that the opulence of crops in the New World was not natural but the result of the labors and cultivations of the "Noble Savages," whom the visitors assumed just lived off the fat of the land. The environment in New England was incredibly variable, with sweltering summers and frigid winters. Native Americans of New England learned to exploit the seasonal diversity by practicing mobility; in the North Indians lived entirely as hunter-gatherers since the soil was not very productive, and the Indians in Southern New England raised crops as part of their subsistence cycles but were still mobile. In the Spring Northern Indians got most of their food from springs, streams, and rivers, where smelt arrived in such quantities that one could not put a "hand into the water, without encountering them." In April they fished for Alewives, sturgeon, and Salmon, and by May were catching cod offshore. They caught tidewater and ground fish such as brook trout, smelt, stripped bass, and flounder with weirs and nets. In April, May , September, and October they captured migratory birds. In September, they moved inland to smaller creeks, where eels could be caught as they returned to the sea. From October to March villages broke up into smaller units and subsisted on beaver, caribou, moose, deer, and bear.

In Southern New England, Indians began their subsistence by moving to summer fields and preparing the ground by working it with clamshell hoes. Maize, along with kidney beans, squashes, pumpkins, and tobacco were grown. Crops were planted between March and late June. After the planting villages dispersed to other planting and gathering sites. Women moved their camps to points along the coast and gathered seafood and the cattails used in the making of mats for wigmans. Men fanned out for extended fishing and hunting trips. From October to December villages broke into small bands to ensure maximum coverage of hunting territory and hunted animals such as deer and bear.

The task was tougher for the early settlers, however, because unlike the Indians, who viewed land as part of a usurfruct framework (you have rights to certain uses of the land, rather than ownership of it), Europeans did not believe that you could legitimately own the land unless unless you cultivated and closed it off. They wanted to transplant European cultivation methods and notions of property (entailing a sedentary lifestyle as opposed to the mobile lifestyle of the Indians), but food did not grow very well in New England. Even worse, believing that summer abundance was perpetual in the New World garden, they did not see the need to store up for the winter, which is why in every early colony most of the settlers died during the first winter. In Plymouth alone half the settlers died before the first winter was over. By the late 1620s Captain Christopher Levett felt it necessary to inform readers to be not taken in by descriptions that made New England out to be a veritable paradise

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He also wrote that in one early attempt settlement the colonists "neither applied themselves to planting of corn nor taking of fish, more than for their present use, but went about to build castles in the air..."

It wasn't just mythology that beguiled many of the early settlers; those who sought to promote colonial enterprises tended to put the best possible face on everything they encountered through selective reporting, exaggeration, and outright lies.(2)

Because the soil was not very fertile in New England, the upper colonies would not be the most productive until the nineteenth century. For the colonial period, the southern region of the United States, with its rich soil, was the source of over 80% of US exports.( However, the crops grown in these colonies, such as sugar, tobacco, indigo, and rice, were very labor intensive and efficient production could only be achieved through large scale production requiring at least 50 workers. Initially, indentured servants were brought over to work the land, but they suffered a higher mortality rate than in the Northern regions, plus the planters only had access to their labor for 3-7 years. It was more profitable to bring in slaves; the planters who could obtain access to ample credit, usually through connections to northern merchants and bankers, could acquire large contingents of slaves to achieve better economies of scale. As their production became more efficient, they could obtain more credit, allowing them to further their advantage.(5) That is why, whereas the Northeastern United States was relatively egalitarian in the early modern period, the Southern regions ended up being dominated by wealthy planters. Nevertheless, the colonies in the Southern United States never achieved the kinds of scale achieved in the Caribbean; whereas the typical Caribbean sugar plantation had 200-300 slaves, in the United States even by the 1850s fewer than half the slaves belonged to planters who owned 30 or more. Whereas 75-95% of the population where slaves in the Caribbean, in the American South slaves never constituted the majority of the population.(10)

One of the more interesting ventures in the New World was the establishment of the settlement in Georgia. Like Pennsylvania and Massachusetts, Georgia was founded to help those with troubles in the Old World. General James Edward Oglethorpe persuaded Dr. Thomas Bray, an Anglican clergyman, to establish a project of the relief of people condemned to prison for debt. In England, thousands of people, the "urban wretches,' were languishing in debt prisons, and as long as they were imprisoned they could not earn the money with which to pay off their debts. Even if they did eventually regain their freedom they years of imprisonment would likely make them unfit for work. In 1732, Dr. Bray and his associates, by royal charter set up a corporation, financed by both private and public funds. The first contingent of several hundred immigrants were almost all debtors. Ultimately, however, the colony was a failure. The climate in the low coastal country--where the fertile land lay--was inimical and resulted in higher death rates than in areas farther north. The 50 acre tracts given to the immigrants were too small to achieve economies of scale for efficient levels of commercial production. By mid-century, slavery had to be legalized, and by 1770 45% of the population in Georgia was black. (5)

Sources

1. American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World
2. Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England
3. Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America
4. Colossus: How the Corporation Changed America
5. History of the American Economy, Eighth Edition
6. The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution
7. "The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective: How Commerce Created the Industrial the Industrial Revolution and Modern Economic Growth"
8. Utopia
9. History of the United States by Charles and Mary Beard
10. The Rise and Fall of the Plantation Complex